There's a photograph from the 1950s that circulates online sometimes, showing a subway car full of passengers, every one of them reading a newspaper. The caption usually says something like "they were always distracted, we just blame phones now." The point is meant to be reassuring: nothing has changed, we've always ignored each other, stop romanticizing the past.

But the photograph misses something. Those people on the subway weren't just reading. They were available. A question, a comment about the weather, a moment of shared frustration when the train stalled, these were possible. The newspaper was a pause, not a wall. You could interrupt it. You could be interrupted.

Headphones are different. The white wires, and now the little pods, signal something more than "I'm busy." They signal "I'm not here." The social contract has shifted. To speak to someone wearing headphones is to intrude, to violate a boundary they've made visible. We've developed an etiquette around this: you don't tap someone's shoulder, you don't try to catch their eye, you leave them alone. The technology didn't just give us music on the go. It gave us permission to withdraw from public space while still occupying it.

This matters more than it might seem.

The sociologist Ray Oldenburg wrote about "third places," the spaces between home and work where community happens: cafes, barbershops, parks, pubs. These places mattered because they were sites of unplanned interaction. You didn't schedule time there. You showed up, and you encountered whoever else had shown up. The interactions were low-stakes, often brief, sometimes meaningless. But they accumulated into something: a sense of shared life, a familiarity with faces you'd never invite to dinner but would nod to on the street.

We've hollowed out the third place. Not by closing the cafes, there are more coffee shops than ever, but by making them places where people sit alone together, laptops open, headphones in, each person a private island in a public sea. The physical space remains. The social function has evaporated.

The same thing happened to waiting. Waiting used to be a shared condition. You stood in line at the DMV, and the shared misery created a temporary community. Complaints were exchanged. Eyes were rolled in unison. Someone might tell you about their day, or ask about yours, and you'd answer because what else were you going to do? The wait was boring, and boredom made strangers available to each other.

Now we don't wait. We scroll. The phone fills every gap, every pause, every moment that might have been empty enough to let another person in. The line at the DMV is just as long, but no one's talking. Everyone's somewhere else, thumbing through feeds, watching videos, texting people who aren't there. The physical proximity remains. The social proximity is gone.

This isn't a complaint about phones. Phones are useful. The complaint is about what we've lost without noticing: the minor, forgettable, seemingly pointless interactions that once stitched public life together. The comment to a stranger about the rain. The shared laugh when a child does something funny. The brief exchange with the person next to you at the bar. None of these interactions mattered individually. Collectively, they were the texture of a shared world.

What replaces them is something thinner. We have more connection than ever, group chats, social media, video calls, but it's all chosen. We talk to people we already know, or people we've selected based on shared interests. The algorithm shows us more of what we already like. The feed is personalized. The public, by definition, is not.

There's a kind of social muscle that atrophies when you stop using it. The ability to make small talk with strangers, to read a room, to navigate an unscripted interaction, these are skills, and skills fade without practice. People report feeling more anxious about casual social encounters than they used to. Some of this is the pandemic's legacy, but the trend predates 2020. We've been withdrawing from unstructured social contact for years, and the withdrawal has made such contact feel harder, which makes us withdraw further.

The fix isn't to throw away your headphones or delete your apps. The fix, if there is one, is smaller: to notice the withdrawal, to occasionally resist it, to leave a gap in the day where a stranger might wander in. It won't feel efficient. It won't feel productive. It might feel awkward, because we've forgotten how to do it.

But the awkwardness is the point. The minor friction of unplanned interaction is what makes it real. Smoothness is for algorithms. Humans are supposed to be a little inconvenient.